Castle Attack: Final AP Calculus Review Game
I’ve been meaning to play the Castle Attack game for the past two years ever since I read about it on a BLOG POST on Calc Medic. It sounded like a fun way to practice skills while incorporating some competition among teams. I finally had a chance to try it out today in my AP Calculus BC class during a long block. We spent the entire hour after lunch on this and they worked the entire time!
I gave my students a heads up that we would be spending our final class before the exam playing a game in teams. I mixed things up by creating new groups for the game. They have been in the same groups for basically the entire year, so I wanted to switch up the team dynamics. One of my students asked if I could play music during the game, so I asked her to make me a playlist and she delivered!
Even though I spent hours the day before creating the questions, writing out the answer key, figuring out how I was going to set up the room, and trying to think of every possible thing that could go wrong so that I could prevent that, there were STILL things to improve that I learned after today. I will record those here as well for future reference and so you can learn from my mistakes!
I hadn’t found a set of problems online pre-made that I liked, so I typed my own up, drawing from a variety of sources. I made sure to use a good mix of BC questions as well as commonly-forgotten AB topics, like IVT, MVT, volumes when you need to solve the functions for x, reasoning about implicit relations, etc. I came up with 30 questions, and none of the teams were able to solve even half of their pile in the hour. When I first typed them up, I put 2-3 of the same problem on each page to save paper, but then I decided to make a different color pile of problems for each group, so I remade the document.
PDF OF PROBLEMS with 2-3 of the same problem per page.
PDF OF PROBLEMS I ended up using with one of each problem. If you use this, copy a set for each group and give each group their own color.
Here is the set-up I used:
Put students in groups of 4 (although you could do 3. I think 5 could be too many) and have them sit together
Have each student staple a packet for themselves of approximately 5 lined sheets of paper. This is where they will do their work for each problem. I debated having them do their work on individual whiteboards, but I settled on paper so they would be able to keep it for future reference. In order to move to a new problem, every person needs to have the correct work in their packet! Otherwise, there will be student(s) who sit and watch their teammates without writing anything down.
Give each student a color. Put a blank slip of that color paper on their desk so everyone knows their color and hang a slip of that color paper on the whiteboard where their castle is drawn and score is kept.
Give groups 60 seconds to choose a team name, write it in their spot, and draw a castle. I timed this on my stopwatch so we didn’t get stuck on this step - as it was, they wanted to keep adding on to their castle after the 60 seconds! Every team starts with 3 lives; we recorded their lives with a star (you could use a heart or asterix or smiley face).
Explain the rules and the objective. The winner is the team with the most amount of lives at the end of the hour.
Each group chooses a team representative. That team rep is in charge of running over to me to show me the group’s work after each problem so I can check it to decide if they get a new problem.
If the problem is incorrect, I tell them to try again.
If the problem is correct and all the packets have the proper work, I put that question slip in the discard pile and they choose a new one from their color pile. They also get to either add a life to their team by drawing a star by their castle OR they can remove two stars from other teams (either two stars from one group, or one star from two different groups).
In this way, a team can never be fully out, since they can just solve another problem correctly and get back into the game by giving themselves a life.
I set up my station area in the back of the room and put the four piles of colorful problem slips upside-down next to me. I sat there for the hour with my answer key and checked their work as the team reps came up to me. I was busy almost the whole hour checking answers, at times giving suggestions or hints, and trying to monitor what was happening at the boards.
Overall, it was a great game and they got really into it. It was entertaining to watch the teams try to sabotage each other or target certain teams. It almost got too competitive and there was definitely some sketchy rule-breaking going on! Here is how I will improve it next time I play a castle attack game:
Have all the teams draw their castles on ONE side of the room. I spread the teams’ board space around the room, and it was hard to keep track of
Have groups draw a big box under their castle on the whiteboard: this is where their stars need to be drawn. I realized too late that some teams were drawing their stars really small on their castle, so they were hard to see and erase!
Some teams chose the sabotage strategy where they didn’t try to add lives on their own board; they just focused on removing lives from other teams. This led to there always being a small amount of stars available. Consider only allowing team to erase other teams’ lives if they themselves have at least one life to work with and are ‘fully’ in the game.
I need a better way of keeping track of which problems each team did. We ended up having a tie (although this was debatable because some teams alleged one of the winning teams added a star at the end when I wasn’t looking), so someone had the idea to make the winner the team that had solved more problems. Well, I wasn’t sure if every team had given me back every problem they solved as they went, and then students put their color problem sheets back on my desk, I wasn’t able to properly manage sheets going in the ‘solved’ discard pile or the pile of unsolved questions. I will probably check questions off as team reps get their work checked - something like this (GOOGLE SHEET link here)
Give Castle Attack a try next time you’re looking for a fun, highly engaging review game!